Defiant NRA wants to arm guards at all schools in U.S.

WASHINGTON -- After a weeklong silence, the National Rifle Association announced Friday that it wants to arm security officers at every school in the country, and implicated violent video games, the media and lax law enforcement as being far more to blame for the recent rash of mass shootings than guns.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," Wayne LaPierre, NRA CEO and executive vice president, said at a media event that was interrupted by protesters. One held up a banner saying, "NRA Killing Our Kids."

The NRA's plan for countering school shootings, coming a week after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was met with widespread derision from school administrators, law enforcement officials and politicians, with some critics calling it "delusional" and "paranoid." Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., said arming schools would not make them safer.

Even conservative politicians who had voiced support this week for arming more school officers did not rush to embrace the NRA's plan. Their reluctance was an indication of just how toxic the gun debate has become in the wake of the Connecticut shootings, as gun control advocates push for tougher restrictions.

Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools -- about one-third of all public schools -- already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days.

Even so, the NRA's focus on armed guards as its prime solution to school shootings -- and the group's offer to help develop and implement such a program nationwide -- rankled a number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"Anyone who thought the NRA was going to come out today and make a common-sense statement about meaningful reform and safety was kidding themselves," said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill., who has called for new restrictions on assault rifles.

LaPierre struck a defiant tone Friday, making clear that his group was not eager to reach a conciliation. With the NRA not making any statements after last week's shootings, both supporters and opponents of greater gun control had been looking to its announcement Friday as a sign of how the nation's most influential gun lobby group would respond and whether it would pledge to work with President Barack Obama and Congress in developing new gun control measures.

LaPierre offered no support for any of the various proposals made in the past week, like banning assault rifles or limiting high-capacity ammunition, and NRA leaders declined to answer questions. As reporters shouted out to LaPierre and David Keene, the group's president, asking whether they planned to work with Obama, the men walked offstage without answering.

LaPierre seemed to anticipate the negative reaction in an address that was often angry and combative.

"Now I can imagine the headlines -- the shocking headlines you'll print tomorrow," he told more than 150 journalists at a downtown hotel several blocks from the White House.

"More guns, you'll claim, are the NRA's answer to everything," he said. "Your implication will be that guns are evil and have no place in society, much less in our schools. But since when did the gun automatically become a bad word?"

LaPierre said his organization would fund and develop a program called the National Model School Shield Program, to work with schools to arm and train school guards, including retired police officers and volunteers. The gun rights group named Asa Hutchinson, a former Republican congressman from Arkansas who has been a strong supporter, to lead a task force to develop the program.

LaPierre also said that before Congress moved to pass any new gun restrictions, it should "act immediately to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every single school in this nation" by the time students return from winter break in January.

The idea of arming school security officers is not altogether new. Districts in cities including Albuquerque, Baltimore, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and St. Louis have armed officers in schools, either through relationships with local police departments or by training and recruiting their own staff members.

A federal program dating to the Clinton administration also uses armed police officers in school districts to bolster security, and LaPierre talked about beefing up the number of armed officers on campuses after the deadly shootings in 2007 at Virginia Tech.

But what the NRA proposed would expand the use of armed officers nationwide and make greater use of not just police officers, but armed volunteers -- including retired police officers and reservists -- to patrol school grounds. The organization offered no estimates of the cost.

Data compiled by Bloomberg News shows that placing an armed guard in each of the 99,000 U.S. elementary, middle and high schools would cost an estimated $7.9 billion, based on annual income, equipment and benefits of $80,000, a figure from the National Association of School Resource Officers, which represents school-based police.

At a news conference Friday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who is leading an effort to reinstitute a ban on assault rifles, read aloud from a police report on the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, which detailed an armed officer's unsuccessful attempts to disarm one of the shooters.

"There were two armed law enforcement officers at that campus, and you see what happened -- 15 dead," Feinstein said.

"Does every law office have to have security? Every business?" she added. "Is this the answer? That America should become an armed camp? I don't think so."